What the Wife of Bath teaches us about misogyny

Marion Turner has written a superb biography of a woman who never lived. Alison, the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is one of the most famous of all medieval women, even though she has only ever existed on the page. But Turner’s beautifully written, rewarding and thought-provoking book about this imaginary woman shows how much her literary existence has to say about actual women’s lives.  

The book is divided into two main sections. In the first, Turner examines four different aspects of Alison – the worker, married woman, storyteller and traveller – and expertly conceptualises the late medieval English world and its attitudes to, and treatment of, women. In Alison, Chaucer gave the ‘ordinary middle-class woman in English literature’ a voice for the first time. In the second section, Turner goes on to trace Alison’s many afterlives, from Shakespeare to Ted Hughes, and her reinventions in 21st-century Britain.